A personal blog owned by Zilko, who regularly writes about his life, or anything that comes up to his mind

Category Archives: Miscellaneous

I would like to say: HAPPY NEW YEAR from Los Angeles!! Let us wish 2018 to be a great year for all of us!! 🙂

The year 2017 has been a big year for me, where I officially got my PhD degree and I also bought my own apartment. So yeah, I am grateful for 2017 and cannot wait for 2018 which hopefully is going to be even better!

Anyway, I started 2017 in Yogyakarta, Indonesia and now ended it in Los Angeles, California. The two places being fifteen time zones apart, this means officially 2017 beat 2015 in terms of my longest non-leap year ever, at 365 days and 15 hours!

So you know this Fall I was following the new Star Trek: Discovery and remarathoning Star Trek: Voyager. Of course I use Netflix for both series; and you know Netflix comes with the cool language options feature. Here are a couple about this feature which I found … amusing!

Star Trek in … Klingon and … Indonesian!!

So as you see in the photo above, using the feature we can watch Star Trek: Discovery dubbed in: Indonesian with subtitles in … Klingon! Lol 😆 .

I think this is a very nice touch of this new series! Though, speaking of the Klingon, this language is widely spoken in the series in the first place anyway (as the Klingons are portrayed as the antagonist). So somehow this feature choice, to me, becomes “less comical” and is actually more in line with the story line. I am not sure what is the original intention, though…

Speaking of the language, while Klingon is not available as a subtitle in the Star Trek: Voyager in Netflix, the Indonesian sub still is! I tried it once to see how the result would be. And here is a short clip of one of my most favorite quotes from Captain Kathryn Janeway from season 1:

To me, it sounds … very strange! Haha 😛 Somehow, perhaps I have associated the characters with their (original) voices so hearing them “speak” in another language does not make it feel “right” to me, haha.

I was very lucky on this trip. Apparently starting from July this year, as a way to encourage people to take public transportation in Wales for long-distance road travel, the Wales government provided 100% discount on eight routes in the weekend. Yep, 100% discount as in the bus ticket on those routes were made free! And the T9 service between Cardiff Airport and Cardiff city centre was one of them!!

This T9 service was certainly going to be my main mode of transportation to get to/from the airport anyway. And somehow the 100% discount was also applied on Saturday and Sunday, the two days I was going to use this service! Lol 😆 .

So yeay for me saving at least £10 with this! Not bad, haha 😆 . Btw, the airport was located quite far away from the city centre, though, where one way trip took around 30 minutes.

I was generally happy that I got to fly a Fokker 70 on this trip and I actually got PH-KZB for that, a Fokker 70 I had never flown before so I could add a new registration to my Flying log, haha.

However, deep down actually I was a little bit disappointed that it was not PH-KZU. You see, I had actually flown PH-KZU before, on my way back to Amsterdam from Belfast almost two years ago. However, this summer KLM decided to apply a special livery on PH-KZU to commemorate Anthony Fokker, a Blitar-born Dutchman who basically founded Fokker, a Dutch airplane manufacturer; as KLM was retiring all of their remaining Fokker 70s this October. So it would actually have been cool if I got the chance to fly it one more time with the special livery!

Too bad I didn’t. I wasn’t that disappointed though because I knew the chance was quite slim anyway at only 1/8 with 8 Fokker 70s still remained in service for KLM Cityhopper at the time.

However on my flight back to Amsterdam, my plane (an Embraer 175 reg PH-EXN) actually parked next to PH-KZU so at least I got the chance to snap a photo of it! Haha 😛 .

The title is self-explanatory, this is my 2000th post here in this blog!! Yes people, two thousand!!

Certainly this is an achievement, a milestone at the very least, though not really a surprising one to be honest. I mean, I have been blogging for so long so it was just about time for me to reach this number, haha. Though, it is still quite amazing to think that I have twice written one thousand posts! Because that sounds like a lot of writing!

In the last three months or so, there have been two big-ish news coming from Sint Maarten. Not good news though, unfortunately. Not too long a go, a woman was killed by the jet blast of an airplane taking off from runway 10 of Princess Juliana International Airport. And several weeks later, a beach goer threw a ball to a plane that was on final approach to the airport. “Fortunately”, the ball missed the plane so a potentially catastrophic accident was avoided.

Anyway, speaking of the jet blast, it is indeed dangerous. At the Maho beach, the famous beach by the tip of runway 10 of the airport, several of these warning boards are present, and the warning is in English:

The famous jet blast warning at SXM

Clearly, the warning is not just there for no reason. And it is because the danger is real. The following is a picture I took of the jet blast of a departing McDonnell Douglas MD83:

The jet blast of a McDonnell Douglas MD83

As you can see it was so strong that you could see the effect on the water.

Having said that, the jet blast is one big “attraction” of the beach. And the beach is pretty much the tourism “heart” of the entire island. To be honest, the beach was also my sole reason of going to Sint Maarten last year. Otherwise, I might have considered some other destinations for the trip. And honestly, I did “enjoy” experience the jet blast as well last year. And it was the cool one, as it was the jet blast of a departing KLM’s Boeing 747-400. And it was, indeed, very very strong!!

I had to hold myself tightly to the fence at the time; and so did many other people. Luckily, we were all fine. But a few days later, when my dad wanted to enjoy the jet blast as well, a tourist fell to the rock after being blown by the jet blast and got scratched so badly that he had to be taken to a hospital. He appeared to have underestimated the jet blast force. According to my dad, the guy just stood on the narrow concrete block by the road at the Maho Beach facing the center of the runway. Lying behind him, then, was the rock formation of the beach. And so when the jet blast hit him, he quickly lost his balance and fell towards the rock formation.

You see, I just want to say that: there are warning signs all across the beach meaning that there are real risks, so please proceed with caution and use your common sense when going there.

The jetblast of an MD 83; see what was happening to these people?

And as for the guy throwing the ball, well, I hope from now on people are more “aware” of the risks and potential consequences their actions can be for other people! Especially when people’s lives are on the line like this!

It would be a total shame if Maho Beach is closed for public. Though I doubt it will happen though as this beach, as I said, is the driving force of tourism, hence economy, of the island. But still…

An Air France’s Airbus A340-300 landing at Princess Juliana International Airport of Sint Maarten.

As I already mentioned above, Venus Williams was the reason of this impromptu trip to London. And so I found it funny when I saw these shaves by Gillette being marketted as “Venus” at the on-board store in the ferry boat I took from Hoek van Holland to Harwich. I felt like the universe “knew” and so this coincidence 😛 .

The last-minute nature of the trip meant higher risk of me forgetting something. And unfortunately, I did forget something this time: my adapter. You see, the UK uses a different plug type than the rest of Europe (So annoying, I know!). And so not bringing an adapter with me made my life a little bit more difficult there. But fortunately, the hotel I stayed in provided several different plug types, even a USB one, which I found extremely useful!! I was really glad I chose to stay at this hotel! Haha 😆

The theme of this Photo Tales post is my latest experiments in the kitchen!

Photo #93

A duck fillet steak experiment

My long weekend trip to Lyon gave me a kitchen experiment inspiration for a duck fillet steak. At the time it hit me how I could never think about it as it appeared not very complicated!

While the cooking part was not that complicated, indeed; the grocery shopping part was, haha 😆 . It appeared to me that duck meat was not *that* popular here in the Netherlands. I mean, the supermarket sold it; but it was not as “visible” and “plenty” as the other types of meat. As I could not find it in my first attempt, I resorted to Google to find out that the supermarket only sold one “type” of duck fillet. It was boxed and was put in a special chiller for boxed stuffs, haha. It certainly made the meat look more “premium”, though, and this might partly explain the price, haha.

Anyway, I liked it! Though I am not sure if I am going to cook it that often, due to the higher proportion of fat (thanks, my nutrition app). Even though this might be because of the skin; in which case the fat would not be a problem if I just ignored the skin. But you know, ignoring a crispy skin on your plate in front of you sounds like a difficult thing to do, haha 😆 .

Photo #94

A high protein meal experiment

Speaking of the nutrition app, aside from reducing my consumption of fat, I am also trying to increase my consumption of protein. And this motivated this experiment to cook the pictured high protein meat, haha.

Lean red meat is obviously low in fat and is delicious for a steak, so that is a given. And then we all know that tempe (I know it is spelled “tempeh” in English but it just feels weird for me to type so. So I am typing it in the original Indonesian spelling here 😛 ) is rich in protein. And before I moved to Amsterdam, my ex-housemate told me about the existence of this “bimi” vegetables, which is a hybrid between brocolli and kailan and also has high amount of protein.

Surprisingly (or not?), the dish worked well!! 😀 For this one, though, I am sure I am cooking this more often (at least more often than the duck fillet dish 😛 ).